A chop shop is a place where
you take something whole and useful and bust it into pieces, each of which can
be sold at a profit. Chop shops are highly profitable and used to be illegal (and
still are for automobiles) until the United States Congress made them legal
entities for Wall Street and large corporations.

The Trans Pacific Partnership
(TPP), if it is allowed to become law, will be our fifteenth venture into this
area of so-called free trade since 1985 and sixteen more are in various stages
of development. Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore started this particular
TTP ball rolling in 2006 and here we are almost exactly six years later, about
to enter the 13th round of negotiations (July 2-10) in San Diego.
How fitting; America's 236th birthday.

All that's heard in Washington
these days is the deficit and the partisan fight over which services to the
poorest of Americans must be cut. The true deficit is a trade deficit and its
brief (and continuing) history of free-trade agreements is killing us.

Prior to 1985 we had a relative
balance of exports and imports, a healthy economy, industry and job base. Since
then, imports have swamped exports, jobs disappeared and American on-shore
industry took a beating. The answer is not to bring deficit spending under
control by removing what few social safety-nets remain, but to reclaim the jobs
and industries lost to "free-trade' agreements. They are not "free,' they come
at the expense of a drained and overworked, underpaid middle class. They come
at the expense of architects now driving cabs, line-workers flipping hamburgers
and entire industries closing down.

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For an impartial view, one has
only to look at who supports and who opposes TPP.

Supporters include

Halliburton,
a company so controversial that it moved its headquarters to Dubai and has
major international offices in 42 countries (including Iran).

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Chevron,
found to have evaded $3.25 billion in federal and state taxes from 1970 to 2000.

PHRMA, an
umbrella group of pharmaceutical companies "broad patient access to safe
and effective medicines through a free market, without price controls and strong
intellectual property incentives."

Comcast,
the largest cable network and subject of criticism for its stance on net
neutrality.

The Motion
Picture Association of America, whose purported goals of "preserving copyright'
are a mere straw man for maintaining total control over member media pricing.

The latter
three organizations are boldly using TPP to redeem the loss in Congress of SOPA
(Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Senate version full title, Preventing Real
Online Threats to Economic Creativity). The House and Senate got such a deluge
of voter resistance that they tabled the legislation.

Jim Freeman's op-ed pieces and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald-Tribune, CNN, The New York Review, The Jon Stewart Daily Show and a number of magazines. His thirteen published books are (more...)